Tag: Bush

Three reports from the Department of Interior’s inspector general found wide-ranging ethics violations between the department’s Minerals Management Service and the energy companies from which it is charged with collecting royalties. Allegations of financial improprieties, illegal gifts, and even the occasional sex- and drug-crazed indiscretion created what the author of the reports called “a culture of ethical failure” within the agency. Ouch.

Barack Obama on Tuesday stepped up his criticism of the outgoing president and the Republican who hopes to succeed him, slamming President Bush for focusing too heavily on Iraq and missing the “central front in the war on terror”—Pakistan and Afghanistan. John McCain, Obama said, would follow Bush’s lead, to America’s detriment.

Cell-phone footage shot by a doctor in a makeshift morgue in Azizabad, Afghanistan, showing rows of dead Afghan civilians, including several children, has led to a renewed inquiry into an American-led airstrike that occurred on Aug. 22. American officials had previously insisted that only seven civilians had been killed in the attack, but they’re now having to face the possibility that the actual figure could be as high as 90.

Whoever wins two of the three big, aging and economically stressed Rust Belt states is likely to be the next president. Obama comes to them with all the potential and all the liabilities he showed during the primaries.

Here’s one way to tell the difference between a war and an occupation: In response to the “success” of the surge and the undefined “victory” that lies just around the corner in Iraq, the president on Tuesday will pledge to maybe reduce troop levels by about 5 percent six months from now after he’s left office. How can John McCain win this argument with Barack Obama?

“Fun Steve is dead” was the announcement that Steve Schmidt, the McCain campaign adviser who The New York Times notes “worked closely with Karl Rove” in 2002 and 2004, made to his team at a particularly low moment last summer. Perhaps unsurprisingly, many of the bombastic tactics Team McCain has since adopted can be traced to the demise of “Fun Steve.”

George W. Bush and his father share more than a last name. Reports show that August’s unemployment rate increased past the level initially forecast, rising to 6.1 percent. But even more disturbing is the fact that the misery index—unemployment aggregated with inflation—also soared to its highest level since 1991, when George H.W. Bush was in office.

Just how dangerous are evangelical zealots? A new book by Jeff Sharlet takes a close and disturbing look at the group known as The Family and its disturbing and apparently widespread influence on mainstream political culture.

Here is what we have gotten with John McCain’s vice presidential selection of Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, picked in part for her extreme anti-abortion credentials: an exquisite endorsement of the pro-choice argument.

Families deserve privacy about family matters, but families that want absolute privacy should stay out of politics. The question that remains is what, if anything, Bristol Palin’s plight may portend for the rest of us.

How would the president rate the government’s response to Hurricane Gustav? In a word: “Excellent.” Eager to escape the shadow of Katrina, which has come to symbolize the incompetence of his administration, Hurricane George made landfall in Louisiana Wednesday for some hands-on disaster relief.

The U.S. is giving Georgia $1 billion in aid, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice has announced. That could be just a friendly donation, or, seen in the light of America’s meddling in the Caucasus, perhaps something more sinister. Sorry we didn’t go to war with Russia, baby, but here’s a billion dollars. Buy yourself something nice.

NATO has now been broken because it was used by the United States and the European NATO members as a tool for expanding Western power into the Russian “near abroad,” and after that, to make an inexplicably rash and dangerous effort to break into and split off portions of the Russian empire as it existed in the 19th century—long before the Soviet Union existed.

While the webloids are busy looking into the drinking habits of young Bristol Palin, The Huffington Post has a disturbing report on Ma Palin’s right-wing church: “Pastor Kalnins has also preached that critics of President Bush will be banished to hell ... and said that Jesus ‘operated from that position of war mode.’ ”

As it turned out, New Orleans dodged the full brunt of Hurricane Gustav, which had substantially weakened by the time it reached the Louisiana shoreline on Monday, but Hurricane Hanna still looms as a potential threat to the nation’s East Coast.

Many Republicans who originally planned to spend Monday in St. Paul with other Republican National Convention-goers were compelled to change their plans, thanks to Hurricane Gustav—including the GOP’s own presumptive presidential nominee, John McCain, who was busy over the weekend playing the anti-Bush when it came to disaster preparedness.

By all rights, there should be a revolt at this week’s Republican convention against John McCain’s selection of Sarah Palin as his running mate—for the very same reasons so many Republicans opposed President Bush’s selection of Harriet Miers for the Supreme Court.

Hurricane Gustav has given the Republicans the excuse they needed to keep the unpopular president out of his party’s big party. John McCain will be spared another awkward embrace while George W. Bush is off in Texas pestering survivors.

In a speech that rose beyond the occasion, Sen. Barack Obama changed the dynamics of the presidential campaign. With fire in his eyes and politeness thankfully forgotten, he finally put Sen. John McCain on the defensive, most notably mocking the Republican’s claim that he’s best suited to be commander in chief.

In 1948, a young Minneapolis mayor electrified Democratic delegates gathered in Philadelphia with a bold endorsement of President Harry Truman’s civil rights policies and the “promise of a land where all men are free and equal.”

The Bush administration has lived by a strategy of tension, and will go out of office bequeathing the wars it has started and the ill will it has created to its successors, to compromise those who come after.

I suppose I should be sad to watch the decline of the once mighty political media, an institution that trained and nurtured me. But that’s not how I feel. For this was the institution that cheered when President Bush took us to war. This is also the institution that is getting this Democratic National Convention wrong, obsessed with a phony feud between Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, wasting time interviewing that small but vengeful cult, the die-hard Hillaryites.

As the Democrats convened in Denver to celebrate Hillary Clinton and nominate Barack Obama, a tiny minority of her supporters continued to behave petulantly. They whined, they blustered, they agitated themselves and each other. But what was it about Sen. Clinton’s repeated endorsements of her former opponent that they could not understand?

The West’s response to the situation in Georgia evades acknowledgement of the damage Georgia’s President Mikheil Saakashvili has done to the United States and NATO, and to Georgia itself, which for the foreseeable future will now be a nation of limited sovereignty, and an awkward embarrassment to its Western allies.

If they want to win in November, Democrats have one task to accomplish this week: Snap out of it. Somehow, tentativeness and insecurity have infected a party that ought to be full of confident swagger.

Speaking to tribal leaders in Iraq’s capital, Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki pledged not to sign a deal with the U.S. that didn’t include a withdrawal date. He also said he would not accept “absolute immunity for anybody, whether Iraqis or foreigners.” That’s a sticking point for the Bush administration, although a draft deal is said to include limited immunity for U.S. soldiers, along with a pullout date of 2011.

Mounting bombing raids and widespread detentions of Afghans are rapidly turning Afghanistan into the mirror image of Iraq. But these very real events, which will have devastating consequences over the next few months and years, are largely ignored by us.

In selecting Joe Biden, Barack Obama has signaled clearly what this week’s Democratic National Convention will be about: He intends to move aggressively to ease the problems that have worried so many Democrats in recent weeks—problems, it turns out, that Obama is worried about, too.

Not only is George W. Bush’s secretary of the interior trying to rewrite endangered species protections, he also appears to be tuning out public input, which is required by law. Scientists and activists from more than 100 environmental groups have signed a petition demanding a longer, more democratic hearing before environmental protection goes the way of the icecaps.

There’s a candidate in this presidential race who remains a mystery—hazy, undefined, so full of contradictions that voters may see electing him as an enormous risk. I’m referring to the cipher known as John McCain.

Why has the U.S. maintained an aggressive stance toward Russia long after the demise of the Soviet Union? And how on earth does that strike anyone in Washington as a productive strategy for America, not to mention the rest of the West?

Even though Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Ron Suskind supplied explosive evidence to support the case that the Bush administration willfully deceived America and the rest of the world about the Iraq invasion, some key players in Congress still insist there aren’t sufficient grounds for impeachment, but the chance still stands to follow Suskind’s lead before the Bush camp decamps from the White House.

Former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev has weighed in again about the recent bloody battles between Russia and Georgia, this time insisting in a New York Times Op-Ed piece that Russia was “dragged into the fray by the recklessness of the Georgian president, Mikheil Saakashvili” and “did not need a little victorious war.”

The Bush administration continued efforts to resurrect the Cold War this week by demanding that European governments back sanctions against Russia. So far, America’s allies in NATO are showing relative restraint in the face of a transatlantic temper tantrum.

For reasons too numerous to fit into a short summary, Pat Buchanan isn’t someone whose writings we’d routinely pick up on this site. However, in this case his essay about the Georgia-Russia conflict, er, bears repeating here, if only to illustrate how not all conservatives see the recent clash in Eastern Europe the way the Bush administration does.

On Saturday, Russian President Dmitri Medvedev signed the French-brokered peace treaty already inked by Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili. However, this is clearly an uneasy and tentative truce: Russian officials say their troops will stay in Georgia for an indefinite time.

Paul Craig Roberts, who was assistant secretary of the treasury during Ronald Reagan’s presidency, sees the Georgia-Russia conflict differently than the Bush administration does: “Americans themselves have nothing to gain,” Roberts said Friday; “What is operating is the dangerous ideology of the American neoconservatives whose goal is to assert American hegemony over the entire world.”

After spending several hours in a diplomatic huddle behind closed doors with U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili on Friday signed a cease-fire agreement brokered by French President Nicolas Sarkozy. Saakashvili, however, made it clear during a follow-up news conference that “this is not a done deal yet.”

Former Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev appeared on “Larry King Live” Thursday to give his read on the Georgia-Russia conflict, asserting that Georgia was definitively the first to attack, in “a barbaric assault” on Tskhinvali, and that “there was support and protection” for Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili from ... elsewhere in the world. Updated

George W. Bush and John McCain may have missed the hypocrisy of condemning Russia’s conduct in Georgia while championing the occupation of Iraq, but Middle Easterners managed to connect the dots, according to the Mosaic Intelligence Report.

Forget the moderate image, promoted by an admiring media. Forget the so-called straight talk and independence. With the Russian-Georgian war winding down, McCain has firmly established himself as an old-fashioned Cold Warrior and a supporter of the huge oil companies that have a big stake in Georgia and the rest of the Caucasus.

With the worst timing imaginable, the U.S. and Poland announced a missile shield deal on Thursday, which prompted a Russian general to strut like a peacock and threaten to punish the land of pirogi. The proposed missile shield has been a go-to irritant for President Bush to use on old friend Vladimir Putin, and for an obvious reason: It works.

The Beijing Olympics are proof that the rule of China’s Communist Party has been validated. Yet human rights abuses continue. What’s really going on? What kind of country is China becoming? Two new books help provide answers.